


odysseus

by thehandsingsweapon



Series: IAFT - old/archived [2]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 05:09:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14205762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehandsingsweapon/pseuds/thehandsingsweapon
Summary: After failing to publish his final collection of poems for his master's degree, Yuuri Katsuki retreats to Minako Okukawa’s summer house on the Thessaly coast. One bright afternoon, a diver emerges from the Aegean sea: hair the color of moonlight, eyes the color of the tides. He’s an archaeologist, Yuuri learns. Not just any archaeologist. He is Victor Nikiforov, whose first book, Beloved, is one of Yuuri's favorite pieces of non-fiction literature. Yuuri’s spent his whole life enraptured by ancient myths, has wandered countless museums to look into the time-washed, smooth faces of Apollo, of Persephone. Only now does he understand why the Oracles gave such dire warnings to the family of Psyche; why they ever insisted Cupid was the one god all other gods feared. Victor unlocks something that saturates his work; makes Yuuri understand why Sappho ever wrote 'let me tell you this: someone in some future time will remember us.'Artifact 0.B: Who Yuuri Katsuki was, before he set sail.





	odysseus

**Author's Note:**

> this occurs in-between events in my fic for the [born to make art history zine](https://borntomakearthistoryzine.tumblr.com).

**0.B**

 

“Look, I recognize that it’s an amazing poem, Professor.” Yuuri Katsuki is a twenty-one year old at Exeter University who deeply, deeply regrets having gotten himself into this discussion. He’s currently being stared at by half of the class and their instructor, walking back the seeming blasphemy of disliking a poem once quoted by Nelson Mandela in prison. They are talking, of course, about  _ Invictus.  _ “I just think it gets used in popular culture in a pretty unfortunate way.” He has been trying and failing to indicate that there are some circumstances that even a stiff-upper-lip can’t withstand; trying to say something, perhaps, about emotional repression. Words, of course, are failing him, which begs the question: why pursue a degree in literature at all?

“Go on, Mr. Katsuki.”

“It just seems to me that some things ought to be felt. I know, I know:  _ bloody, but unbowed. _ It’s clear he’s facing strife. But aren’t there things people can’t always conquer?” He will never explain the way he needs to know that some fights can’t be won, not to this audience. Back in his dormitory there is a prescription for anxiety medication. He wants to know that his continued failure to regulate his own thoughts is not for lack of trying or for some internal flaw which he has yet to correct. At best, Yuuri expects to wrestle the wild, feral half of himself into a draw for the rest of his life.  _ Perhaps Henley, with his focus on the soul and not the body, changes the terms of the fight?  _ A different student suggests. Yuuri disagrees with the premise; as far as he can tell the distinction between a soul and a body is made up of magic and wishful thinking, but he’s grateful, because the conversation redirects and provides a window through which he can escape debate. And that is for the best. His palms are sweaty and his heart is racing. 

Maybe it’s time to talk to the counseling center again. It was hard enough to darken those doors the first time: to admit that he has had every possible advantage and yet still he finds himself existing right at some water-line of fear and self-loathing, forever afraid of the next terrible wave. His father is a wildly successful chef in Brighton; his parents are the co-owners of one of just a handful of independent, five-star resorts left. He’s grown up wanting for remarkably little: he’s had a liberal, well-rounded education, provided at private schools and with plenty of extra time for the arts. His parents and his sister are sensible, pragmatic, supportive people. He’s ordinary and unremarkable and probably too-sensitive, by comparison; he dreams of being a writer, but doubts himself every step of the way. 

The reality is this: he will graduate with a teacher’s qualification, probably, and in a not-too-distant world he will face a room of pre-teens, and he will develop a habit of shoving his hands into his pockets to hide the way they shake whenever he stands at the front of the class.

After class, he’s approached by a brunette with freckles who sits a few seats over in the lecture hall. “Hey, Yuuri?” She asks, sheepish, flashing a nervous smile. “I liked what you had to say, today.”

Yuuri’s life would be easier if he could like this girl. She has a button nose and a little bit of a flush on the apples of her cheeks, and someday someone will decide these things are precious. Right now she’s trying too hard to get to know him, though, and Yuuri is the sort of person who has a moat, high walls, and a labyrinth crafted around the fragile center of his heart. And that’s just the least of her obstacles. Yuuri is the product of private school; he’s endured crew practices and watched fencing matches. He has far too clear a 

picture of the way sweat can drip down a man’s throat or the way the muscles of the forearm expand and contract as the body moves. “Thanks,” he says, and he lets the conversation die there. His roommate, sworn in on this secret, will convince him to go out this weekend, and he’ll have too much to drink, and he’ll stumble into a bed he doesn’t intend to stay in. For a moment, this will silence the white noise; he will grip the headboard as he rises and falls, stumbling into a cheap and momentary bliss. He breaks more than one heart when he leaves in the morning, convinced nobody could possibly want him more than just the one time. 

Two years later, Yuuri is staring down the suggested curriculum for the secondary school he teaches at in Dover. Suggested poetry:  _ Invictus.  _ It will be easier to follow the existing rubric; he’s only had just the one summer to formalize lesson plans and now is probably not the time to get creative. He’s here temporarily, after all; the prior teacher is on maternity leave. He’s taken up a habit of going for a run in the mornings before class; the white cliffs are spectacular and the sights and sounds of the channel always clear his head. He walks into his classroom and sits on the desk, and he looks out at twenty teenaged faces from every possible walk of life. He asks for a volunteer to read the poem, so that when the words  _ I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul  _ sound, they are not declared with his voice. He lets it sink in and polishes his glasses to distract himself from his nerves. “I don’t feel that way very often,” says Yuuri, who flashes a wry, self-deprecating smile. “Do any of you?”

At the end of the semester, the school’s administration lets him know that the prior teacher is due back from her leave and that he’s no longer needed. He passes through London on his way home; Phichit, his old roommate, here now on a job where his title literally is  _ Social Media Strategist,  _  offers him sympathy  _ you’ve been fired  _ drinks. “What will you do now?”

Yuuri, who’s been thinking about the day he started letting that one class of students actually tell him how they felt, who’s lately been gobbling up more and more anthologies by modern poets who refuse to shirk away from the realities of now, shrugs. “I’ve been thinking about grad school,” he admits. Yuuri has a terrible time opening up; he’s constantly afraid of what might happen if he did. Yet on his nightstand is a notebook, and in that notebook, he sometimes approaches something that feels honest.

A little over two years after  _ that,  _ Celestino Cialdini’s booming voice and broad smile and big hair will suggest that even that work is not quite good enough. “It’s very candid, your thesis. Which I admire, I really do.” Yuuri waits for the other shoe to fall, because he’s known for a long time that he’s a dime-a-dozen writer, and all Celestino’s doing is saying so. “... It’s just a little underwhelming. And muted. You approach your own anxiety at a distance, almost like it’s not your own.”

“It’s safer, that way,” Yuuri mutters, and Professor Cialdini, who is, of course, both a romantic and an optimist, reminds him that ships are made to be at sea. This is how he fails to graduate on time; quietly and without fireworks. He makes plans to lick his wounds back at the hotel in Brighton, but word somehow gets around to his mother’s most intrepid friend, Minako Okukawa. Minako is a whirlwind of a person: a former prima ballerina, and, at one time, his dance tutor. A choreographer in high demand. A three-time divorcee. 

“I told your mother I’m carting you off to Thessaly for the summer,” she informs him, over the phone. Minako is perhaps one of the only people Yuuri tolerates bullying him around like this, and maybe only because the habit, from those childhood dance classes, never quite faded. 

“Minako, you don’t need to take pity on me.”

“I’m not taking pity on you,” Minako snorts. “I’m taking advantage of several key facts: I’ll be teaching at three different dance camps this summer, and so I’ll be in and out of the house, and  _ you  _ need a place to write where you can’t hear Mari’s punk music from three rooms over. Besides. I’m telling you from personal experience that there’s absolutely zero shame in picking up a handsome Mediterranean lover, Yuuri. I’m sure there will be plenty of men available.”

These are the kinds of frank conversations Minako is able to have without blinking. Yuuri envies her fearlessness, her self-assurance. “I am not going to Greece to have sex with random men,” Yuuri grumbles. He refuses to have this conversation with someone who used to correct his posture, at age eight.

“Of course not,” drawls Minako. “You’re coming to Greece to housesit. I’m glad we’ve established that.”

 

\- - -

 

> **anxiety** **  
> ** unpublished;  
>  by Yuuri Katsuki   
>    
> 
> 
> \- - -
> 
> I think it is something like  
>  being in the trunk of your own car  
>  as it rattles down the hill
> 
> You do not know how you got  
>  to where you are
> 
> and you do not know who it is  
>  doing the driving.
> 
> __ Didn’t you get your license,  
>  the authorities say after  
>  all sensible people at the scene of the crash
> 
> _ Breathe,  _ they tell you  
>  as though your hands  
>  were ever  
>  on the wheel
> 
> You cannot choose not to drive;  
>  at birth each of us is given  
>  only the one vehicle
> 
> And every grey morning  
>  you must climb into yours again.


End file.
